While watching Alton Brown make tzatziki sauce on Good Eats:
Me: There are a bunch of places to get Greek yogurt around here.
Wee: Made with the milk of 70 virgins!
Me: Um.
Wee: OK. That's not true at all.
Me: Really.
Wee: (Pause.) And I guess virgins don't have milk.
Me (from hallway outside of Bill's office): I wonder where I put the ornament box?
Bill: Man moves a dog's face with a banana patch!
Me: .....?
Bill: Perhaps you put it back in the garage.
The other day Bill brought home from work two of the tiniest apples I've ever seen. He's been bugging me to eat them, but I want to take pictures of them first. This morning we were discussing their cuteness again, and I started sniffing one.
"What are you doing?"
"Smelling it."
"That's not going to work. They don't smell until you bite them." Pause. "Like puppies."
It's shit like this that makes me think that I want to raise my kids in a cabin deeeep in the woods.
When I spread toppings on bread or bread-like surfaces, I have a really, really hard time stopping before I've verified that every square centimeter of the surface is thoroughly and evenly covered. I was eating dinner at a friend's house for the first time when her father said, to my startled chagrin, "I see Tracy makes a career out of buttering her bread." I'd never noticed before he said that, but he was right; and now I'm a little wincey when people comment on it.
Even more people have commented on another of my manual-task quirks, which is that while I write with my right hand, I curl my hand over what I'm writing, the same way a leftie does. Thom swears up and down that this has some connection to his memory of seeing me writing left-handed when I was a preschooler, and correcting me. However, no one else in the family seems to recall this, even though he was the next youngest and therefore presumably the least involved in teaching me to write - so if others also corrected me from writing with my left, why can't they remember doing it? Odd. Yet, I do brush my teeth, iron clothes and shoot my .22 better with my left hand. I can write with it on a 3rd-grade level or so.
Still, I don't see how this would explain why I'd end up writing like a leftie with the right. I assume a left-hander does that to keep their hand from smudging the ink. However, my writing that way actually makes me smudge more than most other righters. It just seems so much more relaxed, though. The regular way makes my fingers feel all cramped up and tight; with my way, the pen nests in the crook of my index finger, resting against the end knuckle of my middle finger (which is why I have a weird callus there that most people don't have. Although that's actually not the most strangely-located callus I've known of - my cycling-obsessed college boyfriend, for instance... well. Never mind.). My thumb lays flat on the other side, holding it in place. It's comfy.
So I just now went and Googled "handwriting position", and there's a term for this style - inverted handwriting. We write from the top of the line down, whereas regular writers write from the bottom up. Researchers say it's a possible sign of "unusual brain organization". Somehow I don't find this notion particularly surprising. Unusual brain organization might be a great excuse, for instance, for why I'm pretty much incapable of sending people birthday cards on time. (And yet, I somehow became a manufacturing buyer, a job where the overriding purpose is timely delivery. Buh?)
Lately, though, my usual style of writing hasn't felt quite right. I keep shifting the pen around in my hand, but it just doesn't seem to fit the way it used to. I've even - *gasp* - caught myself writing the crampy way a couple of times. Maybe my hand is going through a mid-life crisis? Next thing I know, it might start demanding that I buy it a pinky ring, or airbrushed acrylic nails with rhinestone appliques. It might take up juggling, or start surreptitiously flipping people off when I'm standing in line at the grocery store. Clearly I'm going to have to monitor this situation.